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sPecial focus
guy moreton
Portfolio three
Dunwich, with its towers and many thousand souls, has dissolved
into water, sand and thin air. If you look out from the cliff-top across
the sea towards where the town must once have been, you can sense
the immense power of emptiness.
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
Originally commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella for the exhibition Waterlog, this work takes as
its starting point W.G. Sebald’s melancholic wanderings through East Anglia in his novel/memoir/
travelogue The Rings of Saturn (1998). The photographs, however, stem from my own distant,
fragmented memories and almost parallel journeys. As a postgraduate student in Norwich in 1997,
I often used to walk along Dunwich Beach with a German artist friend who lived in Suffolk. I
remember vividly the walk along the shingle beach, before we climbed up onto the heath and walked
back through the woods, past the ruins of the Grey Friars monastery and the last surviving gravestone
from All Saints churchyard. We lost touch towards the end of 2001. In 1999 I lived in Rotterdam, as
an artist-in-residence, and travelled through the landscape of South Holland: in particular the low-
lying waterlogged marshes called Het Verdronken Landschap, or the Drowned Landscape. Like
the narrator of The Rings of Saturn, I visited the Mauritshuis to see the paintings of Rembrandt,
Breughel, Van Ruisdael and Vermeer; walked the marshes of Haddiscoe and Reedham and visited
Somerleyton. Had Sebald continued his English pilgrimage further north around the east coast, he
might have reached the ruin of Dunston Pillar, Britain’s only land lighthouse, built in 1751 to ‘guide
travellers through the treacherous heathlands and marshes of South Lincolnshire’. It is situated close
to the city of Lincoln, where I was born, and where Waterlog can be seen, at the Collection, until
16 December.
Special Focus_Photo.indd 10 11/9/07 14:17:47
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